Building Loyalty: Creating Value Through Customer Experiences (RIKON Group)
Building Loyalty: Creating Value Through Customer Experiences (RIKON Group)
Donnelly, Ms. Martina BUILDING LOYALTY: CREATING VALUE THROUGH CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES - RIKON Group. In: Tourism and Hospitality Research in Ireland, 2008, Tralee, Co. Kerry.
A review of the academic and practitioner literature on customer relationship management indicates a general consensus that quality, value, and satisfaction are critical variables in explaining customer loyalty in tourism services, yet, although much is known about the relationship between the aforementioned variables and customer loyalty, they don’t fully explain how customer loyalty is built. This paper argues that one critical variable has been excluded from consideration that impacts on customer loyalty, explicitly customer experiences. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to rectify this significant gap in the literature and present a relatively new perspective of customer loyalty that recognises that the customer has to interact with the components of a service in order for the service to become ‘real’ (Echeverri 2005) and that the successful management of customer experiences leads to a differentiated competitive advantage (Smith and Wheeler 2002). Based on the literature reviewed, observations are drawn for future theoretical and empirical development in the field of customer loyalty.